I find it amazing that drinking games can be applied to pretty much anything. Buttttt…for all of you binge-drinking enthusiasts out there, here’s a game that can only be played once a year: The State of the Union Address Drinking Game!

Rules

The general rules of this game are no different from any other drinking game. Every time President Obama says a certain word (ie: “change”) or phrase (ie: “make no mistake”), you take a drink/shot. A drink is either a shot or a good gulp from a beer (or cider). All you do is watch the speech and play along. If all goes well, you’ll be unconscious by the time they show the other party’s response. For an extended list of keywords, phrases and rulesa, check out their website or their Facebook Group. This year, President Obama’s State of the Union address is scheduled for Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 9pm (Eastern). It should be broadcast on all major networks and cable news/political netorks. For online coverage, go to http://www.c-span.org/executive/stateoftheunion.asp.

Game History

This drinking game dates back to when George Washington gave the first State of the Union address on January 8, 1790. I’m pretty confident there’s no evidence of that fact, but I’m pretty sure it happened. On the other hand, I do know that is when the State of The Union Address began. As for the drinking game, the website (DrinkingGame.US) says nothing about it’s history. “I’m sure there are other people who have made similar games, but I think most people play by our rules,” Marc Melzer, one of the creators of the State of the Union Drinking Game and now a lawyer, told AFP. (Yes, they were interviewed by the AFP as well as The JDF.)

I decided to do a little research of my own. WhoIs information for the site says the domain was registered in 2004. I decided to contact the owner, Marc Melzer and a few questions myself. “We did it our senior year of college in January 2002, mostly for fun. We were on the campus and thought this was a great idea to distract us from work. We hosted it on a college site and people responded with over 50,000 hits…in 3 days. In 2003, we saw more like 500,000 hits in a matter of a week. We ran into trouble with bandwidth issues. In 2004, it found it’s final home on DrinkingGame.US (how appropriate!). ” (Marc Melzer, Co-Founder of DrinkingGame.US). When I asked him about the other sites that promoted their own versions of this game, he said that there was nothing they could do. It was a matter of an impossible Copyright.

It looks like this game has gained a lot of popularity since 2002. Major web publishers have put out their own articles about this game, and GAVE NO CREDIT TO DRINKINGGAME.US!

(Entertaining) Disclaimers…

And what kind of game would this be if there were warning labels attached to it? After researching the sites that promoted this game, I decided, that instead of posting my own disclaimer, I’d simply post theirs. Enjoy:

This is, hands down, the most cracked version of Jingle Bells ever produced. Quoting Huffington Post, “It’s like they took the classic song, soaked it in a tub of LSD, then took a match to it.” Who could come up with such a thing? Well, at the end of the clip, it has the “NICK” (as in Nickelodeon) logo…though as of now, it could have been thrown in there. First Slumdog Millionaire dominates Hollywood, and now XMas! Go India!! What will they think of next?

For five minutes last Monday, the bread aisle at Gourmet Glatt became an avant-garde musical theatre.

Customers were surprised, to say the least, when 7 students broke into a song and dance routine to the tune of “Be Our Guest,” from Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. They did it to help drum up online publicity for NCSY’s 18th annual auction. The six dancers are all NCSY alumni.

They seem to have met their goal: the recording was the most-viewed video last week in YouTube’s non-profit category, according to NCSY’s marketing and PR director, Duvi Stahler, who came up with the idea. As of press time Tuesday evening it had been viewed over 9,000 times.

Stahler hit upon the idea of a musical interlude from this year’s top prize: a year’s worth of free groceries from Kosher.com, the online supermarket that operates out of Gourmet Glatt’s Cedarhurst facility.

“The idea was to do something as a grand prize that [people] need, not luxuries, something people have to spend money on,” he explained.

While the number was heavily rehearsed, the recording bears a touch of improv nevertheless. The video shows an elderly woman who insisted on disrupting the performance, pushing through the dancers to get a loaf of bread.
[*Original Article Above Found On The Jewish Star.]

Of Course They Made #1…

What did you expect? Of course this idea worked! According to Duvi Stahler, the concept for this video was inspired by ImprovEverywhere’s “I LOVE LUNCH” prank. Every one of their videos is an immediate success, so by following their guidelines, Duvi was confident this video would work as well.

I have a feeling the inspiration for this video also came from ImprovEverywhere’s “GROCERY STORE MUSICAL” (1 Million+ YouTube views) prank, Published 3 weeks before “Supermarket Takover”. Though Duvi claims originality, it’s not an issue. The point I’m trying to make is that Viral Videos like these work!

In Conclusion…

I guess if you’re a small business or niche organization, and you want to go Viral, just copy ImprovEverywhere. No, seriously…just copy them…Until you can come up with something original, do them a favor and give them credit at the end of the video.

The game is called World of Goo, and it’s really an awesome game. Normally it costs $20 to buy the game but right now they are having a promotion that allows you to pay anything you want for the game. Let me repeat that…PAY WHATEVER YOU THINK IT’S WORTH!

It’s not free…but they’ve found a new use for all those pennies hiding around the house. You have to donate at least 1 penny but otherwise its up to you. And this isn’t some low-level, under the radar, game. “Brilliant, stunning, and ridiculously fun … World of Goo is so good that it oftentimes feels like a title developed internally at Nintendo” (IGN). The game itself is fairly simple. World of Goo is a physics based puzzle / construction game. The millions of Goo Balls who live in the beautiful World of Goo don’t know that they are in a game, or that they are extremely delicious.

All versions of World of Goo – Windows, Mac and Linux – are on sale until October 19 for “whatever you think it’s worth.” Just go to 2dboy.com, click the “GET IT” link. That’s it!

Viral Marketing Genius’s

This is simply marketing genius. They’ve allowed the consumer to decide on a price and once this campaign is said and done, they’ll have a better idea of their average buyer. Oh…that’s besides the fact that their sales will probably have gone through the roof and once the users get hooked, imagine when the next release comes along. Want to start a revolution? MAKE IT FREE!